Aberdyfi Accommodation

More About Aberdyfi

The estuary and the open beach are what people come for. At low tide the sand widens into ribs and bars that shift with every season. The Eryri National Park information centre at Wharf Gardens opens daily from the end of March, and it is the place to ask what the tides are doing before you set out.

The railway runs along the front with two halts in the village, so you can reach Machynlleth, Tywyn and Barmouth without the car. Outward Bound founded its first school in the world here in 1941, and its boats still work the estuary through the season.

Nearly every account of this village says it is immortalised in the old Welsh folk song “The Bells of Aberdovey”. It is a good story, and it is not true. The song was written by Charles Dibdin, an Englishman, for a London comic opera, and it was in print by 1785.

It became Welsh by adoption, printed in a collection of Welsh airs in 1844, and by the time anyone checked, the village and the song belonged to each other.

The village settled the matter in the most direct way available to it. In 1935 the vicar wrote to a bell foundry and asked for a carillon that could actually play Clychau Aberdyfi. Ten bells were hung in St Peter’s and dedicated in June 1937. The place had been sung about for a hundred and fifty years, and then it went and built the bells.

St Peter’s is open most days between ten and four, and the bells are there to see. There is no published schedule for the carillon, so ask at the church rather than travelling on the strength of hearing it.

There is a second bell down at the jetty, made to be rung by the sea. Marcus Vergette’s Time and Tide Bell has hung in bronze beneath the jetty since July 2011, and an opening in the deck lets you stand above the sea and look down onto it. Whether it sounds depends on the tide.

Beyond the bells, this is an estuary village inside the Dyfi Biosphere, the only UNESCO biosphere reserve in Wales, so the sand, the marsh and the channel in front of the houses are one protected landscape. Climb the old coach road behind the village — everyone calls it the Roman road, though it was cut around 1808 — and the whole estuary opens out below you.